


Signs of Life

by Adelth



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Cecaelia Yuuri Katsuki, IN SPACE!, M/M, Mad Science, MerMay, Rich Victor Nikiforov, Robot Feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 23:44:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18727270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adelth/pseuds/Adelth
Summary: Victor Nikiforov just needed a place to repair his ship, but landing on a long-abandoned planet means discovering the mystery of its sole remaining inhabitant.





	Signs of Life

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I know I don't need another project, but it's MerMay and I had the beginning of this fic already written.

“No,” said Victor, eyeing the warning that flashed across his center console with dismay. “No, no, no. Don’t do this right now.” The console responded by chiming out a stall warning, in contradiction to the overspeed alarm that was still active, and the fact that a stall was impossible outside of an atmosphere anyway. 

Already suspecting the source of the error, Victor turned off the autopilot. The alarms silenced themselves, but his brow didn’t unknit. He reached up to flip the switch for his secondary autopilot to take over, a partitioned backup to the system that was currently failing. The alarms immediately started up again, this time including a particularly shrill siren that warned of a hull breach. He’d only just managed to slap it into silence when a truly dire dangerous terrain message came blinking across his viewport, though apparently only the midship attitude control sensors could tell he was about to slam into some catastrophic obstacle.

Victor growled a credible impression of a Hexxii curse his favorite techmonger was fond of. The language wasn't particularly friendly to human vocal cords, but Victor had a bit more leeway than most in what he could pronounce. He wasn’t entirely sure what the expletive meant, truthfully, but based on usage he’d gathered that it was more or less equivalent to “motherfucker.” 

Perhaps due to the circumstances of his exposure, it had become Victor’s customary reprimand when hardware failed him at inconvenient moments.  _ Inconvenient but not disastrous _ he reminded himself. At least it was one of the sensory control modules that had gone haywire, and he wasn’t actually at risk of sudden decompression or crashing into a non-existent terrain feature.

Theoretically Victor could still finish his journey if he was willing to pilot the whole way manually, but that would make for a very long trip. He was flying single-handed, as was his preference, and even he could only go so long without sleep. He’d lose time looking for a safe place to berth, on top of the time he actually spent sleeping. He also wouldn’t be able to travel through the most convenient spaceports, where traffic control mandated the use of autopilot to prevent accidents.

He slouched back in his seat, blowing his bangs out of his face as he stretched his legs. He wasn’t stiff, neither he nor the pilot’s station were designed for that, but the stretch still felt good. 

Taking a long moment to gaze through his viewport, he let himself be entranced by distant pinpricks of light while he reminded himself why he traveled this way, instead of in one of his parent’s well-staffed schooners. 

He reached across the small flight deck and tapped his fingers against the hull of his ship, a reinforced strut just within reach. Titanium alloy over a high carbon nano-ceramic, warm fingers against cold metal. Withdrawing the hand, he set a finger against his own mouth; the texture was soft and giving this time, warmth against warmth.

He discarded the thought of calling his family for help.

On balance, these were his options: he could take the long way home, he could suit up for an EVA, or he could find a place to land and do this the easy way. There’d been a similar failure not long after he’d purchased the cruiser, and he’d replaced the entire module not five years ago. Aware that the three other modules were still original, he made a point of carrying a mostly built spare, ready to be modified as a replacement as needed. 

Still, although he had an electron beam gun on board, he wasn’t eager to try welding in a hard vacuum. He’d much rather land somewhere with enough of an atmosphere to make a more conventional arc weld viable. Better yet, he’d like a garage where he could just pay someone else to do the work, but he was a long way from that kind of amenity.

There wasn’t a planet chartered for habitation within several days travel, he knew that already. Humans hadn’t claimed so very many worlds that they were hard to keep track of just yet. There was a siderophilic asteroid mining operation, but unless they were feeling  _ very _ accommodating, they weren’t going to help him. It was more than likely a fully automated enterprise anyway, without even disgruntled employees he could bribe. His techmonger had  _ opinions _ about the kind of law-skirting that happened on the far edges of civilization, where obscure businesses might avoid either decommissioning or emancipating the almost-AIs they relied on for decades.

Changing his parameters as he flipped through the ship’s directory, Victor started looking for any nearby planet that might suit his needs. His new search brought up Proxima-b, a rocky planet with a breathable atmosphere, which looked to have gone uncolonized due to the 200 km deep ocean that covered the entirety of its surface. It was tidally locked, one face continually scorched by close proximity to its sun, so tight was its orbit around the small red dwarf.

His cruiser was reasonably versatile, but it didn’t have pontoons. If Proxima-b was entirely undeveloped, he would have to move on. That said, there was a long expired commercial exploration charter attached to the planet. Very long expired, Victor realized, hunching forward with interest. The project had been abandoned almost 200 years ago, and given where they’re located…

Scanning through the registry, Victor sought out the corporation that had filed the charter, and cross checked the dates. He whistled in appreciation. Proxima-b had been claimed for exploration by interests located on Earth, back when it would have taken 20 years for a spacecraft to travel between the two. It must have been one of the first commercial planetary charters on record. They’d gone all that way… to harvest semiconductors and dopants? 

And here Victor had been under the impression that platinum group metals had been the elements sought out by space’s first prospectors. 

The now defunct venture seemed to have been focused on boron in particular, which was downright odd. Chemically uncombined, elemental boron was only found on Earth in small amounts deposited by meteoroids, and might well have been worth mining. What could have been extracted from the waters of Proxima-b, however, seemed unlikely to differ all that much from what could have been extracted from Earth’s own oceans. 

Astrobiologists, on the other hand, had a decided interest in extraterrestrial boron. When combined with water it became borate, which stabilized ribose in a way that made the formation of RNA, and therefore the storage and replication of genetic information, possible. 

It was, in short, a sign of life.

Victor hesitated to assign motives to people who lived centuries ago, but a for-profit enterprise secretly seeking out proto-life seemed dubious. Maybe it was easier to do so as a resource management company than a research firm for some reason? Victor had little knowledge of contemporaneous space travel policy, only lingering disquiet.

Why Proxima-b had been abandoned, at least, wasn’t mysterious at all; intense solar flares were eating through the atmosphere. That wasn’t entirely surprising behavior from a red dwarf like Proxima Centauri, but having the brightness of the star suddenly increase by a factor of 1000 during a massive flare certainly was. For a span of seconds Proxima-b had a sun 10 times brighter than Earth’s own, and that had been enough to scare the prospectors away. They’d been planning to build their operation on the dark side on the planet, but no one wanted to be exposed to that kind of radiation. 

Happily, they looked to have left a landing platform and maintenance facilities behind, the bare beginnings of a testing site. They’d be ancient, but all Victor needed was somewhere to land. Repairs would only take an hour or two, and the chances of Proxima Centauri happening to do something unfortunate during that time were minimal. Cautiously optimistic, Victor charted a course and engaged his thrusters.

~

Victor had been prepared, been half expecting even, to have to scupper his plan. There was every chance the centuries-old facilities on Proxima-b would be unusable, left to the seaworld’s irradiating flares and briny fathoms. 

Instead, they looked pristine. They weren’t modern, they didn’t look like they've been updated in 200 years, but they’d been assiduously maintained. 

Victor almost forwent landing, worried he was about to drop into a very cleanly smugglers nest. His sensors weren’t detecting any lifeforms, but he wasn't entirely confident they were to be trusted given his current troubles. The landing pad was right there though, and truthfully Victor was loath to leave the mystery unprobed. 

The landing itself was uneventful, save for the moment the platform lit up to welcome his arrival. He’d nearly pulled up in shock, but the process seemed automatic, rather than a herald of hostile intent. 

He armed himself before leaving the ship, taking time to poke around the floating base before beginning his repair. There wasn’t much to it, besides the landing pad, there was a combined hanger and workroom, along with a barebones office and washroom. There weren’t even bunks, though he supposed cots might be stored somewhere. The whole structure rolled with the waves below, nearly sending Victor tumbling more than once. 

He was testing the shower, which somehow still ran fresh water, when a loud creak from the workroom made him snap to attention. It was followed by a heavy clang, which sent shivers snaking up Victor’s spine. There was nowhere to hide - the shower didn’t even have a curtain - and he couldn’t go for his gun without being terribly obvious. Caught out, he raised his hands and turned slowly around. 

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t an equally stunned man half protruding through a hatch in the floor, dark hair wet and chest naked. They both stared for moment, then the stranger nearly sent himself back down the hatch he flinched so hard.

“I’m sorry! I wasn’t...I didn’t.” He stopped, looking up at Victor as if  _ he  _ was the inexplicable element in the room. “I didn’t think anyone was coming.” 

Without giving Victor a chance to come to terms with his own confusion, the stranger began hoisting himself onto the platform. Victor got a brief view of skin moving over flexing muscle, before being entirely distracted by the black tentacle that infiltrated through the hatch to grip a handhold on the wall and help pull the...man...through. 

He didn’t have legs. What came through the hatch after the man’s torso was a mess of thick, black, prehensile coils. Victor had a hard time keeping track of what they were all doing, but one reached out to close the hatch behind the man as he moved away, familiar with the space and how to navigate it.

He bustled around - opened a locker here, replaced something in a drawer there - incredibly industrious with his many limbs. It had the distinct air of nervous busy-work, which alleviated some of Victor’s fear, if not his shock.

“I tried to keep everything running, but I’ve had to prioritize essential systems. I ran out of containers for samples, so it made sense to cannibalize the testing equipment for parts. I  _ know _ it was expensive, but not even my batteries can be recharged indefinitely, and I’ve lost more than half the solar panels to weather and wear.” The man didn’t look at Victor as he spoke, half facing away to monitor his tentacles working.

“What are you?” Victor asked, perhaps insensitively, but unable to parse through his confusion to find any other question. 

The man slowly put down the screwdriver he’d been holding, transferring it from hand to tentacle to workbench. He turned his head, one eye meeting Victor’s over his bare shoulder. His eye was brown and normal, but the pupil rapidly swelled and shrunk twice, dilating in a way that was thoroughly artificial. His torso sagged, even the tentacles seemed to wilt. 

Then he was gone, back down the hatch in a rush of black, without even saying a word. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I'm Adelth and I have too many WIPs. 
> 
> Tell me what you think of this one, and/or find me on tumblr [here](https://adelth.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


End file.
